edan 6 is just bad

[Getafix]

personal i think its the worst area and after my 5 plathrough as moze i just didn't want to play that area

it's just so boring

[Ailes]

Boring in terms of gameplay, story and/or visuals? I liked some of its aesthetics, there are quite a few gorgeous spots that I made sure to capture in all their glory with the photo mode. Eden-6 also has a bunch of nice music tunes.

[Holografix]

Same. after my 8 playthroughs, i liked the Eden 6 map the least.

[Duilf]

I have mentioned Borderlands 3's story lacks continuity before, but have specifically avoided this topic. Being the first to mention it felt like a cheap pot shot at a tender area. While a nice idea on paper Edan 6 makes no real sense whatsoever. The supposition was Jakobs stayed out of the corporate war by having their own planet be extremely undesirable, but stop to think about that for a moment. What would a corporation find desirable? The conditions a corporation will thrive in. It isn't just about using different materials then the competition ether Edan 6 is a slum in a backwater location even by Pandora's standard. Also if multiple generations of Jakobs have been on a planet with hostile lizard, and simian life why have these animals never been used as resources. The Cowboys Jakobs are based off of were animal handlers in multiple forms.

Actually that raises a good point. That borderland's has massively underutilized food, and the implications of food. Food, and fashion are the location based cornerstones of culture. By even displaying Foods from each corporations we would get a sense of each corporations home planet way before the location is actually introduced. Say if world diplomacy collapsed and even large countries were broken up into chunks. Devoid of global commerce which would happen if the corporations where actually at war things like food would be based on what is widely available, and that would eventually change people's tastes as it is what they are used to eating. We even partly see this with global commerce in place as local foods are cheaper while it isn't worth selling some food products in some places due to the conflict with local's preferences.

To be fair this isn't the kind of broad thinking that often makes it into sci-fi/fantasy settings. Even renowned successes like Star Trek only ever use food as a foil. However as storytelling becomes more in depth should we continue to ignore the importance food can have to explain wider details?

PS for anyone questioning how that is relevant. They obviously went into making Eden 6 with a set plan for how it should be. Most likely this was based on their impression of Jakobs, and Hammerlock in prior games. This plan shaped the environment that we ended up dealing with.

[Gila]

Yes I recently replayed the game's story a second time after a really long break from it (first time was around its release).

Eden 6 was the worst part, it just drags on far too long.

Pandora was nothing new, Athenas way too short. Promethea and Nekrotafeyo were alright. Overall felt like they wanted to cram too much into the game, to the detriment of it.

[kukuhimanpr]

whats worst is that b3 devs focused so much on humperlog and jakob eden 6 arc yet completely ignored eden 5 which is gaige's home planet (they also disbanded b2 hunters and didn't include gaige at all in b3 main story). also eden 5 is a neighbor moon located super close to eden 6. so they have no excuse to just completely dismiss gaige and eden 5 in b3 main story like that. (gaige has her own eden 5 arc though before the fragileplotholey b3 timeline in the novel borderlands debt or alive made by b2 writer anthony burch)

so if you want some borderlands stories that is faithful to the lore continuity from its fellow iterations, you're in the wrong place by looking too hard into b3 story.

just ignore b3 canon and make your own headcanon from the better made lore parts from classic borderlands games and other medias (ignore the movie too...)

[Nakos]

Enh... I liked Eden-6. If for no other reason that we finally get to kill Aurelia.

It was Nekrotafeyo that I thought was the weakest (in terms of overall design). I found the "Beta-test" quest to be deeply insulting (on several meta levels).

[Ailes]

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Originally posted by Duilf:

I have mentioned Borderlands 3's story lacks continuity before, but have specifically avoided this topic. Being the first to mention it felt like a cheap pot shot at a tender area. While a nice idea on paper Edan 6 makes no real sense whatsoever. The supposition was Jakobs stayed out of the corporate war by having their own planet be extremely undesirable, but stop to think about that for a moment. What would a corporation find desirable? The conditions a corporation will thrive in. It isn't just about using different materials then the competition ether Edan 6 is a slum in a backwater location even by Pandora's standard. Also if multiple generations of Jakobs have been on a planet with hostile lizard, and simian life why have these animals never been used as resources. The Cowboys Jakobs are based off of were animal handlers in multiple forms.

Actually that raises a good point. That borderland's has massively underutilized food, and the implications of food. Food, and fashion are the location based cornerstones of culture. By even displaying Foods from each corporations we would get a sense of each corporations home planet way before the location is actually introduced. Say if world diplomacy collapsed and even large countries were broken up into chunks. Devoid of global commerce which would happen if the corporations where actually at war things like food would be based on what is widely available, and that would eventually change people's tastes as it is what they are used to eating. We even partly see this with global commerce in place as local foods are cheaper while it isn't worth selling some food products in some places due to the conflict with local's preferences.

To be fair this isn't the kind of broad thinking that often makes it into sci-fi/fantasy settings. Even renowned successes like Star Trek only ever use food as a foil. However as storytelling becomes more in depth should we continue to ignore the importance food can have to explain wider details?

PS for anyone questioning how that is relevant. They obviously went into making Eden 6 with a set plan for how it should be. Most likely this was based on their impression of Jakobs, and Hammerlock in prior games. This plan shaped the environment that we ended up dealing with.

While not wrong per-se and I guess an interesting sci-fi topic generally I think you might be digging a bit too far there at least as far as Borderlands is concerned. As far as understood it it never much was about or cared for realism. I'm fairly sure there were a few posters on Eden-6 that made sort of fun of local traditions or food sources in the established Borderlands kind of humor. (Maybe I'll look through my screenshots later.)

This is not to say that the story in BL3 wasn't very "oooffff" or "wtf?!" at times. I had to strongly tell myself on several occasions to just not think about it and shut off my brain because stuff just didn't make sense especially not if some of the story/lore from the previous games is incorporated.

Still, these thoughts you have about Eden-6 and Jakobs and food or resource acquisition generally seems to me like a lesser issue. But I guess it doesn't make much difference regarding the already pretty big pile of conflicting details featured in BL3.

Originally posted by Gila:

[...] Pandora was nothing new, Athenas way too short. Promethea and Nekrotafeyo were alright. Overall felt like they wanted to cram too much into the game, to the detriment of it.

I was wondering about Athenas, if it was intended to be that short. That "Behind the Scenes" stuff in the main menu featured images of what seemed like additional Athena maps. They were labelled "Once Upon A Time in Athenas" and "Athenas Dog"-something if I remember right.

Personally I disliked Nekrotafeyo. I was just expecting more, or something hugely different. But it was just, like, meh, fairly uncreative alien planet with a bunch of floaty stuff. And... a few rotating cubes... Wow, holy crap, the Eridians knew something about pointless anti-grav tech, which is totally unseen and unheard of in this sci-fi setting! (/s). They could have done so much more there with low gravity or warped reality or stuff similar to what was done in the Krieg DLC. Also, they didn't care much about the lore for that either. They established something one moment and basically said "yeah, f*ck it" in the next one. Pretty sure the description for it on the galaxy map says something about it having been hidden for epicly long, being inaccessible to all kinds of sensors and stuff. Yet Maliwan seemingly had been setting up shop there for god know's how long, and don't even mind all the sidequests on the planet. I know Claptrap I think or the description for that "Clapslist" quest made subtle fun of that, like "don't think about it, buddy, it's Borderlands". I mean this is probably similar to the Jakob's and food acquisition topic. But, I dunno. Nekrotafeyo felt like basically any other planet in the game. And then the enemies... They could have also gone super crazy there on Nekrotafeyo. But what did we get? More of the same melee and flying and spitting things. Oh, yeah, and more of the same Guardians. For how special Nekrotafeyo was supposed to be it felt... immensely generic.

I believe the game somewhat ran it's course. I'm hoping all the best for BL4, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. It's just difficult I guess to come up with something new. Especially the Guardians are nothing new anymore. I thought they were super cool in BL1. Now all the mystery and uniqueness about battling them is all gone, and we opened so many vaults in BL3 that they lost all their appeal too if you ask me.

The lore/story and design of the vault bosses also is a total mess. 99% of them are being built-up as some kind of planet-devouring, galaxy-ending, time-destroying super monsters - but then you face off against them and they are sometimes hardly larger than yourself and die in the blink of an eye. How many f*cking variations of an allegedly super-bad "Destroyer" have we killed now??? What the hell was that fusing thing between Tyreen and the Destroyer? Didn't she want to do something else with it, have it killed by us and then leech its powers??? But she basically jumps into its mouth and then merges bodies with it?!?!

Oh, wait, yeah, I have to remember myself: "DO NOT THINK ABOUT IT."

Some of the DLCs aren't better either regarding boss lore and design. I was hugely unimpressed by the Ruiner. Rose wanted to conquer Gehenna or the galaxy with a slightly larger crab-thing??? And boy, could we question the involvement of the Jakobs corporation on that planet too! But, hey: "DO NOT THINK ABOUT IT!"

I'm just not buying it anymore. I'm sorry. Just drop all the Vault Hunter nonsense, Gearbox, and switch the focus to something else... Give us interesting baddies... I don't think Handsome Jack was as perfect as some make him out to be, but those Calypso twins were fairly awful in comparison... And why are we still so badly attached to that dustrock Pandora... There is a whole galaxy out there... Let's explore it without all those strings and leashes holding us back...

And honestly I don't need every game trying to feature as many previous vault hunters as possible either. Holy sh*t, must it be difficult to write stuff with so many things rotating in and out. Can we stop with this kind of fanservice already? Because I doubt it's helping with getting a good story together too and contributed its part to the one in BL3 being such trash. I mean the Krieg DLC wasn't bad and I thought Gaige was fun in that Hammerlock one too - but let's be honest, she was a Temu version of Tiny Tina.

[Duilf]

Sorry no way am I quoting all that. Ailes you seem to be misunderstanding my point about food. Put simply if a creative team thought about what a specific group ate that would be a springboard to define the group more as a whole. In other words it is planting an idea seed to grow a creative tree. With more grounding there is less chance for a train of thought to detail. It isn't something I thought Borderlands would do. It is an idea i think would end up dramatically helping creative team therefor it is something we should be doing. The bottom line is in current conventional storytelling there are a lot of moving parts that are just decorative, because we as a people don't understand how to use them as helpful tools.

Also this is a spoiler tag. Put your mouse over the black to reveal the content. This is a [*spoiler*]spoiler[*/spoiler*] tag with * to show what it looks like

[Nakos]

Originally posted by Ailes:

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Steam code for Spoilers is {spoiler} {/spoiler}

Only use square brackets instead of curly ones.

[Ailes]

Originally posted by Duilf:

Sorry no way am I quoting all that. Ailes you seem to be misunderstanding my point about food. Put simply if a creative team thought about what a specific group ate that would be a springboard to define the group more as a whole. In other words it is planting an idea seed to grow a creative tree. With more grounding there is less chance for a train of thought to detail. It isn't something I thought Borderlands would do. It is an idea i think would end up dramatically helping creative team therefor it is something we should be doing. The bottom line is in current conventional storytelling there are a lot of moving parts that are just decorative, because we as a people don't understand how to use them as helpful tools. [...]

You don't have to quote "all that", you can just do "[...]". Or reply the way you just did.

You demand too much from this IP. I already told you about posters and stuff on Eden-6. Who said they don't eat lizards or simians? Just because it may not have been directly brought up doesn't mean it isn't happening. And why would it be? Barely anyone would care. The devs would be wasting resources if they went this in-depth on this stuff. This is a game about shooting and looting, not some scientific thesis on culture and economy.

It's also >not< needed to not have stuff derail. BL3 went with things so much off-the-rails as is, even contradicted freshly introduced lore of its own seconds later after bringing it up. It was just overall poorly written. Having had some "creative tree" emerge from questions of food, resources, culture and whatnot would have changed little about that. The devs evidently already struggled to come up with a good story as is, you would really want them to have things narrowed down as much to realistic cultural and economic details?

I would argue the creative team on BL is hampered by other things which I already mentioned, like being forced to repeatedly have us fight on Pandora, by having to pander to fans by reintroducing previous vault hunters and by generally having exhausted the whole Eridian-Guardian- as well as vault hunting thing to death. I don't want to fight Guardians anymore, I don't want to open even one more vault. I got bored of it enough in BL3. If they were clever they would largely ditch that stuff in BL4 and reinvent the game way beyond adding silly gameplay nonsense like sliding or slamming that never made sense outside of the Pre-Sequel. But I strongly doubt that it's some "creative tree" or more finely defined groups/corporations that will save this IP.

Just to give a perspective of how stupid the IP sometimes can be with its own lore, and yes also outside of Borderlands 3: I replayed the Thanksgiving DLC in BL2 a few days ago (or it was that Badass Crater of Badassitude) and Mr. Torgue made some reference to Henry IV. You know, the king from Earth? Unless there is some yet-to-discover portal into our dimension or until I missed some very, VERY important lore bit when playing the games then there is no way that Mr. Torgue would have known something about an old English king from Earth.

But I'll acknowledge that generally speaking sci-fi sometimes fails to think the simplest things through or ignores its own premises. Whenever I see some Star Trek episode and Picard is quoting or some people are acting as Shakespeare or whoever from our at that point old-as-a*s Earthly times I feel my immersion ruined. Because it would be a bankruptcy of creativity if that far into the future we would still be quoting and talking about the same five to ten individuals from hundreds or thousands of years ago. It's the year 5152612-whatever and people still know and talk about Shakespeare? Please, that's just super silly. But just the same I realize that it would also probably be a waste of time and thought for most sci-fi IPs to create a whole set of new persons to reference - or in your case a proper cultural backdrop other than what we see on the surface. It could be very boring also. Most people aren't that super nerdy about these things. I'm sceptical as to how useful it would be for storytelling, at least as far as video games are concerned.

[kukuhimanpr]

the ending build up from b2+b1.5+tftb implied that borderlands fans should expect a big jolly coop adventures with all the friends and (un)reliable allies they've gathered from all their previous struggles to hunt more vaults and fight more megacorp banditos baddies across the 6 galaxies. thats already a happy hype expectations that make sense with the theme of the series being about looter shooter adventures blasting baddies and experimenting on builds with mix of stories that juggle between wackiness and grim tragedies.

b3's story scale was expected by fans and the previous games' endings to be like marvel infinity final vs thanos tier 'heroes'vs 'villains' showdown where we get as much returning characters and new characters to fight the new ominous threats while adventuring through many new locations throughout the 6 galaxies.

but b3 ruined that expectations. instead disbanding and broken many bonds between returning (and absent but should have been present by the expectations of borderlands players and previous endings) characters and focuses the story too much on ava+the twins siren+humperlog fanfic instead.

its clear gbx can't handle the expected big scale story for b3. maybe partly because gbx being too cocky invested a lot in battleborn to compete with overwatch and failed, so its less development resources for the ideal b3 game. the rumors about gbx ceo randy's bad conducts doesn't paint a good image either for the development process of b3.

maybe gbx should have maybe split up the b3 story parts through dlc themed expansions instead. maybe something like 5 extra story dlcs since the main b3 game should be started n the first galaxy where pandora resides with each new story dlc maybe set up in another galaxy... prolonging the story with worthwile contents while ramping up the scale gradually throughout the 6 galaxies with each story dlc. that way lots of returning and new characters would get at least decent enough relevances until their spotlight closure time in the ideal b3 main story.

thats just a wishful thinking though. just make our own headcanons instead.

[Duilf]

I already told you that you didn't understand what I meant. Instead of burying yourself in left field trying to find my point just say so as well.

[OffDARK HERO]

Yeah its so bad :(